Enterprise Relationship Management (ERM)

What is Enterprise Relationship Management?

Enterprise Relationship Management (ERM) is a business strategy or solution that involves analyzing data to better understand internal enterprise relationships, customers, and customer use of produced products or services.

With enterprise relationship management, businesses can access, analyze, and share information about all of their employees, suppliers, and strategic business partners as well as customers. It has all the tools needed to identify and assess the factors that impact these relationships and put the necessary best practices in place to maximize their contribution to the bottom line. ERM is built on the belief that personal interactions - not automated transactions - are what create successful business relationships which add value over time as they grow stronger.

The goal of ERM is long-term customer satisfaction and increased profitability through a better understanding of the relationships between entities in an enterprise. This can be achieved through data mining techniques such as pattern recognition, trend analysis, segmentation, and clustering. ERM solutions often involve software that helps identify potential issues or opportunities within an organization's network of partners and customers. By having this information at hand, companies can make more informed decisions about how best to engage with their partners or target new customers in order to maximize profits while maintaining customer loyalty.

Many businesses also use enterprise relationship management solutions to closely monitor competitive activity. Customers, partners, and even employees can provide a wealth of valuable information about other vendors.

Enterprise relationship management applications make it easier to capture, store and analyze that vital data, and use it to create more successful business plans and strategies.

What Does an Enterprise Relationship Management Solution Do?

With an ERM strategy and related technologies in place, a business can:

• Identify and leverage its greatest relationship assets, such as its reputation, or those employees who have strong individual connections with key clients or external business partners.
• Gain a greater understanding of its customers, far beyond the typical sales, marketing, and support information contained in a CRM system. With enterprise relationship management, a company can uncover how clients actually use a particular product or service, what their preferred payment and delivery methods are, and more.
• Uncover vital trends in employee behaviors, and learn more about the factors that positively and negatively influence productivity, satisfaction, and loyalty.
• Improve the flow of critical information between suppliers, resellers, and other business partners, and enable them to more actively participate in the business process by giving them a complete and timely view of all their interactions with the company.